


Frisdom

by Aja



Category: A Northern Light - Jennifer Donnelly
Genre: F/M, Yuletide, Yuletide 2011
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 22:11:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>after the events that took her away from Eagle Bay, Mattie finds that among the challenges and pleasures of starting a new life, some ties to home have grown stronger than ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frisdom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bouquin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bouquin/gifts).



> Happy holidays, bouquin!

Terrorcipitation.

It was easy to think, when we were all still innocent, when my greatest adventure was pranking Table Six with Fran and Ada, that never would we have worries beyond the occasional rudeness of the patrons of the Glenmore. The same things that kept Eagle Bay out of reach from most night terrors--its relative isolation, its small-mindedness, its backwater northernishness--were also the things that kept us safe while we were there.

In many ways, I don’t think I realized how deep that sense of safety ran until Grace Brown forever upended it. It was as if I had lived all of my life under the cover of a veil--so that when she came into it, and ripped the veil away, I saw everything clearer, more sharply--felt everything more strongly. And I felt as if I might never be quite _safe_ ever again.

The boarding house on Mulberry Street was crowded and noisy, and compared even to the tiny room I had shared at the Glenmore it was barely the size of a monk’s cell; but it was functional, even cosy once I had placed flowers on the bare dresser and carefully laid out my writing materials atop the tiny desk by the window. From there I could look out upon the comings and goings of the lower East Side; the merchants hawking onions and celery and parsnips at the produce stands across the avenue; the women with their large baskets and their wide skirts and the urchins that ran between them, pocketing money wherever they could and sometimes hiding between the folds of the unsuspecting fishwife when the street constables strolled by. Pushcarts jostled their way through the street, until the urchins yelled the approach of the street coppers, and the way miraculously cleared to let them through, a perfect model of a modern, clean city pavement with well-behaved street vendors, no more than a half dozen or so per city block; until the cop disappeared around the corner, and the pushcarts and basket-sellers emerged once more.

It was an entirely different world from that which I had left, but it made me feel alive. I was daily invigorated by the sights and smells and sounds of a new place that seemed to draw all its energy from the people themselves. It was the kind of energy that a girl like me could eitiher be swept up in or swept away by; I suffered in the early days from an overwhelmed need to connect to everything and everyone: I wanted to talk to all my neighbors, find out their stories, their histories, their destinations. I tried to befriend the urchins who raced around my skirts as I shopped--this ended after one of them robbed me of my days’ wages. I had taken employment as a copywriter for a local gazette within the tenement district; the owner paid eighty-three cents a day for the time i spent pouring over articles on tenement rights, pushcart laws, and child labor, as well as the recent innovations in the Ford company with his new Model T. For all of the supposed progressiveness of my employer’s journalistic ethics, I was expected to work six days a week in dingily-lit rooms where I breathed in the constant fumes of ink and cigarettes. By the time I had collected my earnings and hiked back to the tenement house on Mulberry Street, fending off the comments of lascivious men in various languages by channeling Fran and telling them what they could do with their suggestions, I was always too exhausted in those early days to have energy left for anything but falling straight into my little cot.

Still, I was determined to make the most of it. Alive with the conviction that Grace Brown would not have wasted a single day of her life in New York any more than she wasted her days working at Gilette, I wrote at any and every available opportunity. I wrote in my thin journal about the street below my solitary slim window. I wrote ad copy for the gazette until my employer grumbled, raised my pay by a nickel, and let me handle obituaries. I wrote memorials for fallen but not forgotten Russian Jews, Italians, and Chinese immigrants, the survivors of whom often barely spoke English and presented over a week’s pay just to have their eulogies printed in two languages. I wrote letters home--letters to Fran and Ada, and to Ms. Emmie and Weaver’s mother, who still lived together in the Hubbards’ old homestead; even letters to Cook, who sometimes answered in her fat brusque hand. Weaver’s mother and Emmie would write their letters jointly: Emmie usually reassuring me of their happiness and telling me all about how Lucifer and the other children were growing up fast; Weaver’s mother nearly always including some bit of news about Weaver, and his successes at Columbia--how he had been awarded an engineering scholarship almost never given out to first-year students; how he had made the dean’s list and been invited to a private dinner with the university president himself; how he was surely swamped with so much schoolwork, and that was why he had not had a chance to reply to my letters to tell me all of these things on his own.

The letters from Emmie and Weaver’s mother, along with their palpable and contagious happiness, unfailingly cheered me, despite the pang in my heart whenever I thought of Weaver, and the fact that despite being in the same city, he was clearly a world away from the squalor of my one-room tenement apartment and my job writing paeans to forgotten immigrants.

At first I was forever afraid that Cook was about to sweep through my door and yell at me for being slovenly or lazy--that the rooms needed sweeping, or the other boarders’ beds needed down-turning, or that my new, more fashionable bob haircut was scandalous and that I was turning into a brazen floozy just like all the other New York girls. But gradually, I adjusted. I lost the fear of every catcall on every street corner, the fear that something terrible was lurking just around the bend. I made friends with a couple of boarders from my building, and on some weeknights when the theatre wasn’t too crowded we’d go uptown to see the Follies--even Shakespeare at the New Amsterdam when I could get the other girls to agree to something a little more highbrow. Sometimes they’d bring me with them to the clubs in midtown, where young Irish men in short coats and bowler hats would ask me to dance. And sometimes, thinking of how Weaver would scoff to see me sitting in the corner in the middle of a dance, I would accept.

The terrorcipitation faded into the sights and sounds of the city, as I began to adjust to the city mself. Instead, what remained was a profound sensation of waiting for something to begin.

And then, it happened. One day, nine months after I took the steamer out of Eagle Bay, he showed up at the bottom of the stairs in my boarding house, looking up at me from the stairwell after I emerged from my room, still in my snow-caked work skirts and boots.

“Well, well, well,” said Weaver, looking exactly as I’d always imagined him in my head: a tall, distinguished Black man in a jacket and tie, as at ease among the squalid “If it isn’t my own Matt.”

I was down the stairs and in his arms in the space of a breath, giddy for the warmth of his embrace as I had been for nothing since my arrival in the city; in half an instant I knew what I had been missing all along, and the sensation struck me so forcibly that for a moment all I could do was close my eyes and take in the fact that he was here; that he was really here; that he had remembered me--and, more than remembered me, loved me.

For a moment we stood like this, in the middle of the vestibule to my apartment building, heedless of the shocked face of the landlord and the shopwomen tromping noisily in from the snow. When I finally looked up, I found his eyes meeting mine, warm and sure, and calm enough to chase away all of my doubts.

“I waited to come--it was hard, but I had to wait,” he said. “Until I could stand before you as a man, and not the boy you left behind--”

“Weaver Smith, you cockamamie idiot,” I said, through laughter. “You were never just the boy I left behind.”

He laughed, then, the sound a ripple over my skin, and pushed my hair back from my face. “It is _my_ Matt, isn’t it?” he said, softly.

My answer was clear.

I had a vision of myself where I stood--poor but hopeful, surviving, drawing all of his strength and fearlessness into myself, just as I had drawn all of Grace Brown’s life and energy into myself the day I left Eagle Bay. I placed my hands in his, and hoped that whatever he was drawing from me was something that echoed from her, to me--something that would live on.

“To the death, Weaver Smith,” I said.

His smile lit the room and my heart along with it.

“To the death, Mattie Gokey,” he said, and kissed me.


End file.
